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Writer's pictureskinnycooktla

Collecting Recipes

Ever since I returned to live in the US, at the ripe old age of 21, I have been collecting recipes--from aunties, pot-luck ladies, mom, grandma and lots of magazines. For years I just stashed them away in shoeboxes. The first time I decided I had to organize them, I was in my early 30s. I remember that as the summer my bedroom had a constant line of stacks of papers along one wall, each stack held down with a book so the papers would not float around at the slightest breeze, and each book with a titled paper sticking out from between the pages..."Soups", "Desserts", "Casseroles", "Breads, Quick", "Breads, Risen", etc, etc...

From there, I taped them onto black paper and then into plastic page protectors, then filled three binders; "Cooking", "Baking", and "Misc.".


Of course, I did not stop collecting recipes and sticking them into shoeboxes, so I ended up doing this entire process again in my 40s. The only difference was that I now had six binders of recipes and, because I was now into scrap-booking, I used clear-view binders and decorated the outside with pretty papers.


Fast-forward another 25 years and I again had a huge pile of loose recipes, mostly organized into big manila envelopes--but still, hundreds. Also, the six big binder I had made were getting too heavy for me to maneuver (my hands are inevitably getting weaker as I age, and face it, I'm not getting any younger!). So, this winter, I bought a bunch of 2" binders, a couple of boxes of black paper and a couple of boxes of page protectors and made a mess on the dining room table for a couple of weeks.


A few summers ago, my niece and nephew had a competition on who got what recipe books when I die (LOL), so I sorted out my favorite recipes and just mailed them the old recipe books, with plenty of blank pages for them to add their own recipes in due time. I sorted out the recipes I wanted to be certain my granddaughter gets. I sorted out recipes that fall under the "really, who am I kidding" category. And then I made all new, more detailed and lighter cookbooks. This is what my cookbooks look like now:



AND I HAVE PROMISED MYSELF I WILL NEVER, EVER AGAIN, PILE UP RECIPES!!

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Tiffany Begley
Tiffany Begley
Aug 09, 2023

I LOVE these binders!

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